Our Investment criteria and Interests for 2016 and beyond

Dear Friends:

Following my joining the board of Elate Partners, www.elateinvest.com – a Chinese investment group backed by large institutional, strategic and wealthy individual investors from China – a lot of you have been asking me about the kind of deals Elate would be interested to invest in in partnership with Blackhawk.
Without further delays, here is the short list as per below.

Guidelines

•  Western Investment:
  • Hard asset-based deals that have “intrinsic values” of their own, for example mines, oil field, certain real estate;
  • Businesses with potential synergy with China;
  • Generally shy away from businesses that rely on services for revenue due to a lack of expertise
• China Expansion:
•  Technology-based and other businesses that could be transferred to China sometime in the future (regardless whether the US operation is kept intact or not);

For More: http://ziadabdelnourblackhawk.com/our-investment-criteria-and-interests-for-2016-and-beyond/
 
Thank you

The Activist Investor - Ziad K Abdelnour

Activist investors: Publicly listed companies fear them. Corporate governance pundits generally do not trust them. Retail investors quietly applaud them, and most laymen do not understand them. However, it is clear that in today’s complex corporate world, we need them. Activist investors may be the only players in the game that can effectively “Occupy Wall Street”.

We have entered the twilight zone when it comes to corporate governance. The zone where many Boards bury their head in the sand when it comes to breaches in compliance, as in the case of HSBC and the tax evasion scandal of February 2015. Certain Boards passively bow to the dictates of executive management, throwing all accountability on the corporation-as-entity, with no individual responsibility. All other stakeholders, from shareholders, to suppliers, to workers, to humble taxpayers are left to peck at what is left of net worth after the share price dives, and are left to fork out money for regulation and reconstruction.

For More:  http://financialpolicycouncil.org/blog/the-activist-investor-a-true-ally-of-corporate-governance

Thank you,

HILARY’S EMAILS AND OUR NATION’S SECURITY - Ziad Abdelnour

My questions are about Hillary’s emails, but they aren’t the usual ones. Everyone is agog about the hubris exhibited by the would-be President and how it reminds us of the First Couple’s dodgy past from not-sex in the oval office to stealing everything they could get their hands on when they left the White House. However, there are much more important questions: namely the security of our nation’s secrets and Hillary’s role in giving them away.

The current White House electronic information security breach by Russian hackers came through U.S. State Department computers. It turns out State Department computers were hacked earlier and the latest report is that it is not at all certain all intrusions have yet been cleaned out. News reports say that State was hacked “for months.” Technically that is true, the reports simply don’t say how many months. If you read all the stories carefully it turns out that those months represent years – the years Hillary was Secretary of State. 

For more information: http://ziadabdelnour.net/hilarys-emails-and-our-nations-security

How to make money consistently – Ziad Abdelnour

After a few decades investing in the markets I am coming to realize that to make money in such markets you have to first and foremost think independently and be humble. You have to be an independent thinker because you can’t make money agreeing with the consensus view, which is already embedded in the price. Yet whenever you’re betting against the consensus, there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble.

Early in my career I learned this lesson the hard way — through some very painful bad bets. The biggest of these mistakes occurred in the early 80s, when I became convinced that the U.S. economy was about to fall into a depression. My research had led me to believe that, with the Fed’s tight money policy and lots of debt outstanding, there would be a global wave of debt defaults, and if the Fed tried to handle it by printing money, inflation would accelerate. I was so certain that a depression was coming that I proclaimed it everywhere. Boy, was I wrong. What I’d considered improbable was exactly what happened: Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s move to lower interest rates and make money and credit available helped jump-start a bull market in stocks and the U.S. economy’s greatest ever noninflationary growth period.

For more information: http://ziadabdelnourblackhawk.com/making-money-consistently-a-review-of-the-state-of-the-art/ 

Investors Can Boost Their Cybersecurity

Now that the Cyberworld is upon us, most of us do most, if not all, of our financial transactions online. Long gone is the day when most of us paid our bills by check or delivered a check to our brokers to invest for us. Now we pay our bills online, either on the biller’s Website, or on our bank’s Website. We don’t write checks – we transfer funds. We rely on the security of the Web site with which we are dealing to protect the security of the transaction. Most of us make sure that the “HTTPS” designation is at the beginning of the address for every Website on which we conduct transactions or share sensitive information. We maintain security and privacy settings on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social Websites where we publish.

Really? Surveys by security analysts show that most people, even tech-savvy people, use passwords they can remember easily, and seldom, if ever, change them.

For More: http://financialpolicycouncil.org/blog/investors-can-boost-their-cybersecurity-back-to-the-basics

Thank You

Rags to riches billionaires - Ziad Abdelnour

It is a fact that out of a world population of 7.1 billion people on the planet and just over 300 Million in the U.S, there are 1,645 billionaires in the world today; 442 of which from the US (2014, Wikipedia) and about 2/3 or just under 1,100 of them self-made.

Now this means that unless you happen to fall into a rather sizable inheritance, all other things being equal you have a 0.00001549295% chance of becoming a billionaire. If you live in the U.S. your odds are 0.00014733333%, which is actually an order of magnitude better (now we’re getting somewhere).

Can never say never though …

Robert J. Pera, founder of Ubiquiti Networks and owner of the Memphis Grizzlies became a Billionaire in 6 years.  At 34 he was listed on the Forbes 10 youngest billionaire’s in the world. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering from UCSD and went to work for Apple.  He left Apple and with accumulated $30,000 in savings and credit cards to start his company Ubiquiti networks. He says ‘success is a matter of identifying opportunities and putting in clear and concise efforts in the right direction’.

 For more information:

http://ziadabdelnourfinance.com/rags-to-billionaire-status-how-likely-how-fast/

 Thank you..